1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to systems and methods for generating structured documents such as extended markup language (XML) documents.
2. Description of the Related Technology
Extensible markup language (XML) is a data description language that provides a mechanism to represent structured data in way that retains the logical structure and interrelationship of the underlying data. In XML, data is represented as Unicode text using standardized markup syntax to express the structural information about that data. In brief, XML syntax includes tags (a string bracketed by ‘<’ and ‘>’) and attributes (syntax of the form attribute_name=“value”) that define elements of a document. The particular tags and attributes used in a document may be selected with reference to the type of data that is represented by a particular document. Moreover, an XML document may be constructed to conform to a document type declaration (DTD) or an XML schema, which are a formal descriptions of a particular type of document. It sets forth what elements the particular type of document may contain, the structure of the elements, and the interrelationship of the elements.
While XML is human readable, XML documents, particularly those which conform to a well-known or standardized schema, provide a convenient means of data exchange between computer programs in general, and on the Internet in particular. However, many of XML's features, as well as the use of text and the structures encoded within the text, make XML document processing processor intensive. Thus, in systems that exchange a high volume of XML data, e.g., e-commerce systems that process XML encoded security data, XML documents may be electronically generated from databases or other sources of data. Such generation of document may tend to consume so much of a server's processing power that the amount of processing power remaining to actually generator or apply the XML data for the relevant application may be impacted. Thus, resource efficient systems and methods of generating and processing XML documents are needed.